Americans haven't cornered the market on reinventing themselves, as Édouard Louis (History of Violence), a French writer whose fiction blends the political and sociological, demonstrates with poetic, edgy charm in his autobiographical novel Change, translated by John Lambert. Born Eddy Bellegueule in the French countryside, Louis "grew up in a world that rejected everything I was." In an opening section addressed to his father, he describes his determination to escape, to become rich and powerful as "revenge against you and the world that had rejected me." When he's 14 he moves to Amiens, a city his father hated "because of the foreigners," to study theater. At school, he befriends classmate Elena, who comes from a family unlike his, with a cultured home that has "thousands of books, an antique piano, reproductions of paintings on the walls." Louis concludes: "This is the life I want to live."
So begins his transformation into Édouard, which he recounts in elegant chapters that chronicle his painful attempts at becoming a writer. These involve his eventual dissatisfaction with Amiens; his desire to move to Paris; his coming to terms with his homosexuality; the many men he sleeps with, some solely for money; and the others, from famous writers to the president of a bank, who mentor him. If Louis has covered some of this terrain before, the return is welcome. Anyone who has ever felt unseen will understand what he means when he writes of "the beautiful violence of being torn away, of having a chance at freedom" and will savor this candid novel. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer